This blog originally appeared on the Pencil Storm blogsite, January 23rd, 2021.
Today - Valentine's Day, 2021 - would have been Sylvain's 70th birthday.
Sylvain Sylvain – lynchpin guitarist, songwriter, & fashion mobster of The New York Dolls – passed away on January 13th after a two and ½ year battle with cancer.
After I wrote that first sentence I followed it about five different ways: the biographical route (Sylvain – born Sylvain Mizrahi in Cairo, Egypt on Valentine’s Day 1951, fled Egypt with his family to escape anti-Semitism – jeez, I GUESS you would flee; if you think it was easy being Jewish in 1950’s Egypt you better think again, mofumbo); the musical route (trying to explain how Sylvain and Johnny Thunders worked like TWO guitarists – and I mean this in an entirely complimentary way – with only ONE brain & one set of hands); the historical route (bringing in Sylvain’s post-Dolls solo career, his time in the David Johansen Group, the 21st century resurgence of the Dolls, etc.).
But you could read any & all of those things anywhere on Google, so I decided to tell you how The New York Dolls saved my rock & roll existence and how badly music sucked in 1973, before the Dolls’ first album came out. Wikipedia tells me that first, self-titled album was released July 27th, 1973. I’m pretty sure I bought it the first week it came out, if not the first DAY – record stores didn’t always HAVE every new release the first day they came out back then – because I had been reading about the Dolls in Creem magazine, my Rock & Roll Bible of the time.
First off, the front cover sucked: the Dolls done up in full gay/transvestite mode (teased bouffant hair & platform shoes dominated). I’m sorry, but I was a born & bred West Side of Columbus, Ohio, boy – meaning blue-collar/lower-middle-working class – and that image was JUST NOT gonna fly with my rock & roll brethren. But OH MAN when I dropped the needle on the record that first day and “Personality Crisis” came roaring out of my cheap-ass Sears & Roebuck speakers – keeping every promise rock & roll had made to me throughout the 1950’s & 60’s – I was in fuckin’ HEAVEN. “Looking For A Kiss” came next, was even BETTER a song, and goddamn if there wasn’t one weak cut on the album (a critique I don’t throw around lightly).
I’ve written elsewhere that previous to the Dolls my favorite “rock & roll” band was Loggins & Messina, and how that was the saddest sentence I’ve ever written, and that is exactly & entirely true. How I could have put the purveyors of atrocities like “Vahevala” and “Your Mama Don't Dance” in the same musical UNIVERSE as the Dolls remains a mystery to me to this day. Except it’s NOT a mystery, it was just the times. In the early 70’s all of my music-loving friends – who had cut our rock & roll teeth on the likes of The Who, The Yardbirds, and The MC5 – were now hippies (or THOUGHT we were hippies, we pretty much all had jobs). And we now all listened to Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Eagles and all that country-rock crap, or singer/songwriter ephemera like Batdorf & Rodney or (God help me) Pearls Before Swine.
Anyway, a picture – or in this case, to be more exact, TWO pictures – is worth a thousand words, so here is Ricki C. (five years before “Ricki C.” was actually invented) before and after The New York Dolls’ first record. If I’ve said it once since 1973, I’ve said it dozens of times: If it wasn’t for The New York Dolls, today in 2021 I would have a gray ponytail halfway down my back and still be listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs on my stereo.
Let’s close with a story: The New York Dolls played my home town on Sunday evening May 19th, 1974; only 9 days after their second album – Too Much Too Soon – was released, so I’m not sure I even had it yet. Pat & I drove to Veteran’s Memorial – a 3000-seat venue on the west edge of downtown Columbus where I had previously witnessed The Turtles, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Bob Dylan’s first electric tour with The Band, The Doors, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who, and many others thanks to my sainted Italian father, who worked a second job there in the ticket office – for the show that Sunday night, and the parking lot was essentially empty.
“OHHHH MAN, the show must be cancelled,” I whined to Pat as we got out of her orange Chevy Vega. (I didn’t have a driver’s license or a car until I was 28 years old.) We walked up the big stone steps to Vet’s to get our refund – rock & roll shows got cancelled at the drop of a hat back in those pre-Ticketmaster/Live Nation days – and ran into Chet, one of my dad’s old buddies, working the door. “Hey Chet, is the show cancelled?” I asked. “No, it’s not cancelled,” he said. “Then why are there no cars in the parking lot?” I continued. “Because there are no people in the venue,” Chet replied nonchalantly, flipping away a cigarette.
Damned if he wasn’t exactly accurate. I had bought front-row balcony seats for the show as was my custom back then, when I would put a little Panasonic cassette recorder on the lip of the balcony to tape the shows without any crowd noise and to get GREAT sound coming right off the stage. When we got to our seats, there were only two other people in the entire balcony, and that couple moved downstairs during the opening set by Isis – a long-forgotten all-female horn-driven funk/rock band from NYC that the Dolls had brought on tour with them.
While the houselights were up in the break between Isis and the Dolls I counted the “crowd.” There were 151 people – counting Pat & I in our own private balcony – in an auditorium that seated 3172 (an exact figure I knew from all the years my dad had worked there). The first ten rows of Vet’s weren’t even full. I was crushed. I’m not ashamed to admit that I very nearly cried. I was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that The New York Dolls were going to be “The Next Big Thing” and render the likes of The Rolling Stones quaint & redundant. Creem magazine HAD TOLD ME THAT. The media wouldn’t LIE TO ME, would they?
I further believed that Elliott Murphy – who had also debuted in 1973 with the masterful Aquashow album – was going to be the New Bob Dylan and that Mott The Hoople – who I had liked since 1969 but LOVED since “All The Young Dudes” in ’72 – were gonna be the Stones AND Dylan rolled into one. Rock & roll was gonna roll itself over in 1974 and rejuvenate itself just like The Beatles and the British Invasion had done in 1964.
But I was wrong. Within two years Lee Abrams and Classic Rock Radio had ossified rock & roll into truly endless re-plays of the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd and Bachman Turner Overdrive that PERSIST TO THIS DAY. And Corporate Rock – your Styx’s, your Journey’s, your Kansas’ (or is it Kansai?), your Boston’s, your Foreigner’s – were poured into the arenas of the Midwest & elsewhere to suck up all those stoned-out Teenage Wasteland dollars. (Thank God for Aerosmith: my salvation of one-word-name 70’s hard-rock bands.)
Does any of this mean I love Sylvain Sylvain and that first New York Dolls record one iota less, 47 years later? Does any of this mean I didn’t love Sylvain’s solo ventures with The Criminals following the original Dolls’ break-up? Does any of this mean I wasn’t thrilled when Sylvain turned up in David Johansen’s first solo band in 1978? Does any of this mean the second incarnation of The New York Dolls featuring Johansen and Sylvain from 2004-2011 and the three great albums they recorded are ever far from my CD player? Does any of this mean I’m not gonna miss Sylvain Sylvain and his heart, soul, guitar, piano & songs until I join him, Johnny, Arthur & Jerry? Not on your life. – Ricki C. / January 20th, 2021
ps. By the way; As the Last Doll Standing, I wish David Johansen good health & a long life in our Rock & Roll Universe.
FEAST YOUR EYES ON THESE, LADIES & GENTLEMEN……
“Teenage News” a David Johansen/Sylvain Sylvain co-write, intended as the first single from the never-recorded THIRD New York Dolls album.
The David Johansen Group, featuring Sylvain Sylvain, in all their rock & roll glory. I know the tag says 1980, but I say this was from 1978.
The 21st Century New York Dolls, rhyming “anthropomorphize ya” with “perversely polymorphosize ya.” Let’s see Mumford & Sons try that.
(My buddy Kyle & I saw this incarnation of the Dolls in 2006 at The Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland, and they were KILLER!)
© 2021 Ricki C.
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